In January 2010, there was a Historical Materialism conference in
NYC that I unfortunately was unable to attend since the CUNY
Graduate Center was not large enough to accommodate all the people
who tried to register, including me. I guess that’s an auspicious
sign of what’s happening politically even though I lucked out
personally.
New School economist Duncan K. Foley’s talk Notes on Crisis and
Social Change can now be read online. The abstract contains these
intriguing words:
Capitalist crisis is neither more nor less favorable than other
periods of capital accumulation for the promotion of fundamental
social change. Left-wing critics of capitalism owe their readers
an account of what alternatives to capitalism they advocate.
Foley believes that “moments of capitalist crisis greatly excite
left critics of capitalism”. I am not sure that this is the case,
even though I have made a point of regularly sending news of the
current crisis to the Marxism list on an almost daily basis. I
don’t think that the crisis in and of itself will lead to action
surely it will lead to a change in consciousness. That is already
taking place as dissatisfaction with all branches of government
reaches new depths. Whether that change in consciousness will lead
to action is, of course, another story altogether. Considering the
self-destruction of the revolutionary left in the 1980s and the
sabotage of the Green Party in the more recent period, we are
certainly coping with an unfavorable “subjective factor” to put it
in Leninist jargon.
full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/responding-to-duncan-foley/
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